Time-of-flight (TOF) cameras are increasingly used in a variety of applications, for example, human computer interaction, automotive applications, measurement applications and machine vision. A TOF camera can be used to generate depth maps which contain information relating to the depth of an object in a scene from the camera. The depth refers to the projection of distance on an imaginary line that extends from the camera, where the distance is the absolute radial distance. A light source at the TOF camera illuminates the scene and the light is reflected by objects in the scene. The camera receives the reflected light that, dependent on the distance of an object to the camera, experiences a delay. Given the fact that the speed of light is known, a depth map may be generated. As the calculations required to extract the depth from the received light signal require a minimal amount of computation TOF cameras are ideal for real time applications.
However, the time of flight measurement may be subject to a number of errors and uncertainties which can lead to errors in the computed depth maps. For example, the reflected light may undergo multiple reflections from different surfaces within the scene which may cause significant errors in the calculated depth.
The embodiments described below are not limited to implementations which solve any or all of the disadvantages of known methods of depth map correction using lookup tables